New Accusations of a Vatican Role in Anti-Semitism

September 1,
2001

New Accusations of a Vatican Role in
Anti-Semitism

By EMILY EAKIN

hen the Vatican announced that it would beatify Pope Pius
IX during its Jubilee celebrations last year, the Brown University
historian David I. Kertzer had reservations. He knew that Pius IX, a
staunch 19th-century critic of modernity who led the Roman Catholic
Church during a tumultuous period that included the demise of the
Papal States and the unification of Italy, was a favorite of the
church's conservative wing.

But Mr. Kertzer, an expert in 19th-century Italian history, also
knew that when it came to Jews, Pius IX's behavior had sometimes
been less than saintly. Interviewed on Italian national radio a few
days before the beatification ceremony, Mr. Kertzer cited remarks
Pius IX had made to an audience of Catholic women in 1871, in which
he referred to Jews as "dogs" who went around "barking in all the
streets" and "molesting people everywhere."

At a news conference the next day, a Vatican spokesman dismissed
Mr. Kertzer's evidence (from a book of the Pius IX's speeches),
saying no "serious historian" had ever mentioned these remarks.

To Mr. Kertzer's ears, this reaction was in keeping with other
official church pronouncements on anti-Semitism in the past: with
rare exceptions, it simply didn't exist. In his polemical new book,
"The Popes Against Jews, the Vatican's Role in the Rise of Modern
Anti-Semitism" (Knopf), Mr. Kertzer takes the Vatican aggressively
to task, arguing that it has yet to acknowledge a history of
church-sponsored anti-Semitism that helped pave the way for the
Holocaust.

The book won't be in stores until Sept. 18, but battlelines are
already being drawn. Some experts dismiss Mr. Kertzer's argument as
a tendentious misreading of the facts. Others say he is merely
bringing the ugly truth to light. But one thing is sure: in
advancing his claim, he steps into the middle of a debate that has
been gaining momentum for 40 years and lately has reached a flash
point. From the recent skirmishes over Pope Pius XII -- who headed
the church during World War II and has been portrayed as both a
saver of Jewish lives and a heartless anti-Semite -- to conflict over
how to interpret a 1998 church statement on the Holocaust, the
history of the Vatican's attitude toward Jews has never been more in
dispute.

In the latest sign of tension, a two-year-old panel of Catholic
and Jewish scholars, jointly appointed by the Vatican and an
international Jewish organization to review papal records relating
to World War II, disbanded last month, its work unfinished. (A news
release issued by the panel's Jewish coordinator blamed the Vatican,
saying its refusal to grant access to relevant archives effectively
hamstrung the scholars.)

But while much of the recent scholarly attention has focused on
Pope Pius XII and the period around World War II, Mr. Kertzer goes
much further back, taking on the Vatican's entire modern history.
Drawing on material from newly opened archives of the Roman
Inquisition (which began in the mid-1500's and didn't peter out
until around 1900), he constructs a picture of church- sanctioned
prejudice and oppression ranging from forced baptisms and
conversions in the 19th century to expressions of virulent racial
hatred in the 20th.

"If you're interested in what role the church played in making
the Holocaust possible," Mr. Kertzer said in a telephone interview,
"it's decades and decades of demonization of Jews."

In the book's introduction, he attacks the Vatican's 1998
statement on the Holocaust, arguing that the distinction it draws
between the church's historic anti-Judaism, defined as "longstanding
sentiments of mistrust and hostility" and Nazi anti-Semitism, "based
on theories contrary to the constant teaching of the church on the
unity of the human race" is not supported by the facts. He writes,
"If the Vatican never approved the extermination of the Jews --
indeed, the Vatican opposed it (albeit quietly), the teachings and
actions of the church, including those of the popes themselves,
helped make it possible."

Reached by telephone, a Vatican spokesman declined to comment on
the book, saying that he had not read it. But scholars who have say
its publication is a significant event. "It's an important book,"
said Michael Marrus, a historian at the University of Toronto who
was one of three Jewish scholars on the Vatican panel that disbanded
last month. "Unlike a lot of writing on the subject, Kertzer knows
what he's talking about. He's seen stuff nobody else has. Its
strength is showing the power of anti-Jewish opinion even at the
center of the Catholic Church."

James Carroll, a former Catholic priest and the author of
"Constantine's Sword" (Houghton Mifflin), a critical history of the church's treatment of Jews, agreed.
"The Vatican is obviously trying to backpedal as fast as it can away
from the dark history of the Catholic Church," he said. "Kertzer is
telling the truth."

But Eugene J. Fisher, the associate director of the Secretariat
for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs at the National Conference
of Catholic Bishops, questioned Mr. Kertzer's conclusions. "There is
a distinction between the church's anti-Judaism, even at its worst,
and Nazi anti-Semitism, which led to the death camps," he said. "If
the teachings of the church had flowed to genocide, that would have
happened around 1300 or 1400 when the church had real political
power."

Mr. Kertzer begins his account in 1814, with the restoration of
papal rule after the routing of Napoleon's army. While elsewhere in
Europe Jews were increasingly free to live as they wanted, Jews in
the Papal States were locked into cramped ghettos at night,
forbidden to practice law or medicine, hold public office or hire
Christian servants. Some were forced to undergo baptisms and
conversions as well.

If a Jewish child was known to have been secretly baptized, Mr.
Kertzer says, he or she would be taken into police custody, given a
new name and raised a Catholic. (One such case from 1858 involving a
6-year-old boy formed the basis of Mr. Kertzer's previous book, "The
Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara," which was a finalist for the
National Book Award in 1997.)

These practices, Mr. Kertzer argues, were the inspiration for the
racial laws enacted by the Nazis and the Italian Fascists in the
1930's. After the fall of the Papal States in 1870, he writes, the
church's hostility toward Jews began to take another, in some ways
more disturbing form: no longer simply loathed as unbelievers, Jews,
now freed from papal rule, became hated symbols of secular
modernity.

As proof, he cites Catholic publications with close ties to the
Vatican, including "L'Osservatore Romano," the Vatican's daily
newspaper, and "CiviltĀ Cattolica," the Jesuit biweekly considered
to be the unofficial voice of the Pope. Among the charges leveled
against them, Jews were accused of being world dominators, tyrants,
thieves, liars, communist conspirators and money grubbers. They were
also said to engage in ritual murder or blood libel, which involved
draining the blood of Christians for use in Passover bread.

By the turn of the century, some Catholic reporters were using
the term "anti-Semitism" with approbation. "In its original form,
anti-Semitism is nothing but the absolutely necessary and natural
reaction to the Jews' arrogance," the Vienna correspondent for
"CiviltĀ Cattolica," wrote in 1922, adding, "Catholic anti-Semitism
-- while never going beyond the limits of moral law -- adopts all
necessary means to emancipate the Christian people from the abuse
they suffer from their sworn enemy."

Such tactics, Mr. Kertzer insists, were condoned by church
officials at the highest level. Drawing on correspondence from the
period in the Vatican archives, he describes how the Holy See gave
behind-the-scenes support to the overtly anti-Semitic Austrian
Christian Social party, bestowed a papal blessing on the author of
an anti-Semitic book and, in 1900, turned down a request from the
Archbishop of Westminster and several prominent English Catholics to
issue a public refutation of the Jewish ritual-murder myth.

Mr. Marrus, whose review of Mr. Kertzer's book appears in the
September/October issue of The New Leader, called some of these
findings "shocking," saying that the book shows "how deeply involved
the leading organs of public opinion and the popes themselves were
on questions like ritual murder."

Other scholars disagreed. "Kertzer's taken the worst examples
said and done in the name of the church and argued that they were
central to the teachings of the Catholic Church," said Ronald
Rychlak, the associate dean of the University of Mississippi law
school and the author of "Hitler, the War and the Pope" (Genesis
Press), a sympathetic portrait of Pope Pius XII. "There were
anti-Semitic articles and editorials, but he discounts popes'
distancing themselves from that."

Indeed, where others have portrayed his predecessor, Pope Pius
XI, as a courageous defender of Jews -- one who tearfully told an
audience of Belgian pilgrims in 1938: "Anti- Semitism is
inadmissible. We are all spiritually Semites" -- Mr. Kertzer depicts
him as a pontiff whose moral outrage was tempered by his allegiance
to traditional church culture, where villification of Jews was
routine.

In Mr. Kertzer's view, the famous hidden encyclical against
anti-Semitism commissioned by Pius XI shortly before his death in
1939 included anti-Jewish stereotypes and was "less than a ringing
condemnation." (The encyclical was never published: Pius XI died
without releasing it, and his successor, Pope Pius XII, who
maintained diplomatic ties with Hitler, did not pursue it.)

But Mr. Fisher disputed this assessment, saying: "There's no
evidence that Pius XI ever saw the draft of the encyclical. You
can't blame him for what's in it. He started a process, it reached
his desk and then he died. This was a pope who was getting angrier
and angrier at the Nazis and more and more willing to speak
out."

In the end, Mr. Kertzer's book seems more likely to incite new
controversies than to resolve old ones. But that, said Rabbi A.
James Rudin, the senior interreligious adviser for the American
Jewish Committee, is not necessarily a bad thing.

"This has been a period of revolutionary change in
Catholic-Jewish relations," he said. "Instead of isolation and
suspicion, you now have passionate engagement. And the last major
issue that has to be resolved is the whole record of the Catholic
Church during World War II and the period leading up to it. There
are going to be more books, more questions, more pressing for
documentation. And that is the way it should
be."